13 Under the Wire

by Gil Reavill

  “Ninny!” Val called out, not knocking or waiting at the door but entering as if he owned the place.

  Two women were inside, a teenage girl, her hair in long braids, who stood at a table in the kitchen, and an older, silent, seated presence, dressed in somber black.

  “Luz,” Val greeted the young girl, who returned a wide smile. Then he crossed and knelt at the feet of the elder. Petting the woman’s cheek, he spoke in rapid, low-toned Spanish, the sense of which Remington could not catch. Val turned and brought Remington forward.

  “Esta es Layla, Ninny,” he said.

  The woman gazed wordlessly at Remington, who realized that there was something amiss—dementia, perhaps, or a stroke. But the presence behind that stare was very much alive.

  “She doesn’t speak,” Val said.

  “Your mother?”

  “She might as well be. Ninny is the woman who raised me. My niñera, my nurse. All during childhood.”

  Remington knelt and put her hand in the woman’s. She felt the old lady’s eyes search her face.

  “And Luzmarie,” Val said, introducing the younger woman as the caregiver for the older.

  The house was larger than it appeared from the street in front, neat and very pleasant. In back, more gardens. Val told her the story of Ninny’s infirmity, that she had been stricken while giving birth to her own child, and that the baby had not survived.

  “Terrible medical care,” Val said. “Down here, you can die of being poor.”

  “Up in the States, too,” Remington responded.

  On an arbor-shaded patio, Luzmarie delivered up one of the most delicious lunches Remington had ever sat down to. Tangy Shrimp Ceviche Verde to start, soft tacos with crispy marinated chicken bits in pasilla sauce, Pozole Rojo that was better now than when it had been served for dinner the evening before, yellow rice and red beans that were themselves a modest revelation. Bottles of frosty Corona with lime wedges stuck in their necks.

  Remington dug in. She realized that she was famished. Throughout the meal, she was aware of Ninny staring at her. After lunch, while the others lingered over café con leche, she walked the backyard garden. Spying the threesome through a scrim of foliage, it seemed to her that the old woman, Ninny, was more animated now that the stranger in the house wasn’t present. She stroked Val’s arm and seemed, after all, to move her lips.

  Something else. Amid the chatter of staccato Spanish from the patio, Remington thought she detected single words that stood out.

  Loushane. Caroline.

  Could it be? She didn’t understand who might have spoken, Val or Luzmarie. Surely not Ninny. But Remington’s hearing was no doubt playing tricks on her. Either her hearing or her paranoia.

  She and Val left the house and strolled through the neighborhood. “You didn’t grow up in Mexico City?” Remington asked.

  “Winters, here. Then, for a stretch, whole years here.” He gestured down a side street toward another beach bungalow. “That was the house of my tutor. An American hippie. Papa was very determined that I learn impeccable English.”

  “So your parents were around, weren’t around?”

  “My parents were very important people, very busy, always away. They spent a lot of time in the States, my father especially.”

  Remington got the idea that the subject was painful to him.

  The stretch of shoreline below the village was empty. Val lifted his arms to take in the whole panorama. “This is, like, not even a hundred and fifty miles south of Zuma Beach, can you believe it?”

  “Where we met.” They had never spoken, for some reason, about the Frisbee encounter.

  “Might as well be light-years,” Val said.

  They couldn’t exactly swim, because the ocean was polluted from effluent pouring out of Tijuana sewage pipes. But they walked along the pretty sand beach and made love again up in the dunes. Remington felt the secrets piling up between them like storm clouds. She shrugged off the nagging sensation.

  The thing about idylls is that they end. It’s what idylls do. Ninny was napping when they dropped back by to make their farewells, so they left without speaking to her. Luzmarie saw them off. Beset by worry and a sense of reckoning, Remington fell silent on the ride back to Tijuas. No off-the-road lovemaking on the return trip. As they passed by the town of La Joya on the way into the city, she fell into an uneasy doze.

  Val shook her shoulder to wake her. The Lexus was parked in front of the villa. “Awful news,” he said.

  Caroline and Ellis are back, thought Remington.

  But it wasn’t that. “Cindy Loushane is dead.”

  Remington would never know why she reacted the way she did, blurting out a single word before she knew the facts.

  “Murdered.”

  —

  Cynthia Loushane, always called Cindy, had never had much to do with Remington. Alone among the children, the youngest daughter of the family boarded away for school. She never attended CYO camp except for one two-week stretch during a single summer, and during that stretch Remington exchanged all of two or three sentences with her. Tall, pretty and vacant, Cindy walked the line that her overbearing father laid down with graceful, precise steps. Her Catholicism might not have run deep—she didn’t have that much depth to give—but she committed herself to it wholeheartedly.

  “The straightest arrow in the family quiver” was how Caroline once put it.

  When Cindy went away for college, Victor Loushane chose DePaul in Chicago for her. The girl chose Kappa Kappa Chi sorority for herself.

  Val Duran reacted viscerally to Remington’s one-word reaction to the news of Cindy’s death.

  “How did you know?” he demanded, blocking her as she tried to get out of the Lexus. She looked up at him with just-opened eyes. He appeared grim. Angry, actually. All the softness had left his face.

  “Why’d you say that, Layla?” He grabbed her arm.

  Remington pushed her way past him and went up the bougainvillea-hung walk to the villa. He followed her as she crossed the big, open living room and went into the bedroom. Retrieving the BlackBerry she had left behind, she checked for calls and found none. She started packing up her things.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” His voice was harsh.

  Remington glanced at him. She felt that she was seeing a whole different side to Valentin Duran. One she didn’t like much.

  “Home,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Why? Maybe because my friend’s sister just died?”

  “What’s that to you? You didn’t even know Cindy that well.”

  She continued packing. There wasn’t much, and it didn’t take long.

  Val tried a different tack. Remington could almost see the mask go up. “Listen, look, stop,” he said.

  He took her by the hand and sat her down on the bed. She realized that he was holding Simon’s Investigaciones Especiales invoice. “Don’t you think—there could be a lot we don’t know—but don’t you think this piece of paper becomes even more important now that two Loushanes have died within a couple weeks of each other?”

  “You’re acting strange.” Remington plucked the invoice away from him, stuck it into a pocket of her suitcase and got up from the bed.

  He tried to maneuver her into an embrace, but she just shook her head. “You might want to consider that your girlfriend is hurting real bad right now.”

  “I know, honey. I’m here for you.”

  “I meant Caroline,” Remington said acidly. “She might need you.”

  “Hey, I never met Cindy Loushane. It’s not like I’m a friend of the family or anything. I’m staying down here.”

  “Suit yourself,” Remington said. “Caroline’s totally in love with you, if you aren’t too dumb to see it.”

  “And you?”

  Remington fully realized the answer to that one even before Val asked the question. She lugged her suitcase out into the hall.

  “Come on, wait,” Val said, trailing after her. �
�I’ll take you downtown.”

  “I’ll get a taxi.” She turned back in her hurry to leave, reaching out to put her hand alongside Val’s face. He was about to say something, but then thought better of it.

  They both realized that it was over between them.

  Chapter 9

  The Surfliner train ran north along the coast from San Diego to Los Angeles, a glorious trip. The scenery was lost on Remington. During the ride she got on her BlackBerry and reached out to the City of Lake Geneva Police Department in Wisconsin.

  She ID’d herself as a member of the LAPD, phoning on behalf of the parents of one of the Kappa Kappa Chi victims. The dispatcher in Lake Geneva routed her around a bit before she landed with a sergeant by the name of Roger Lowell.

  Remington and Lowell first had to perform the obligatory song and dance that protocol demanded whenever cops from different jurisdictions encounter each other. It worked to establish bona fides. Remington wasn’t worried that Lowell would smoke her out as a police-academy probie. She could talk cop with the best of them. She’d been hearing it her whole life.

  But Sergeant Lowell wasn’t particularly suspicious. On the contrary, he seemed eager for conversation. Weary but eager, if that combination was possible.

  “You know that we don’t have a name on the killer yet, right? He’s still a John Doe.”

  “Right,” Remington said. Some thirty-six hours after the fact and no positive identification? The criminal databases had to be glowing red-hot. Law enforcement abhors a vacuum.

  “The Bureau of Prisons has got nothing, and we didn’t get a hit in IAFIS.” Lowell was talking about the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, or IAFIS, pronouncing the acronym “ay-fiss” the way everyone else did.

  “You’ll get there,” Remington said. “No one’s anonymous nowadays.”

  “We’re thinking Caucasian male. Some folks think he reads Hispanic, early thirties, maybe from Chicago, maybe a migrant worker. Door County has a lot of seasonal pickers this time of year. But, really, we don’t have anything to go on.”

  Remington summoned up details from the accounts in the newspapers she bought at San Diego’s Santa Fe Depot. The Kappa Kappa Chi killings were all over the media. “I hear the killer was shot to shit in the firefight. That’s got to complicate ID efforts, right?”

  “You sound young,” Lowell commented.

  She wanted to respond that he sounded the same, but she let it pass. It was already evening back in Wisconsin. She envisioned the young sergeant, sideburns maybe, a mustache for sure, officer in charge of a darkened, half-deserted station house. She thought she caught a whiff of fright, too, or at least uneasiness, as if Lowell wanted to stay on the line in order to fend off the spirits of the dead.

  “The department isn’t really releasing many details,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of reporters up here.”

  “Out here, too,” Remington responded. “Look, I’m not into releasing details, either. I’m calling as a courtesy to Victor Loushane.”

  “Yeah, boy!” Lowell exclaimed. “That gentleman sure has some heavy-duty weight behind him. We had a Chicago archbishop on the line earlier. One of your senators called our chief—not a state senator, either, the U.S. kind, and not an aide. Please hold for Senator Foxhall, you know?”

  “So?” The train was rolling through the green hills around San Juan Capistrano. The contrast between the golden sun on the western ocean and the conversation Remington was having could not have been more extreme.

  Lowell let the pause play out. “You want the grit?”

  “Why I’m calling. I heard it was bad.”

  “He passed over that sorority cabin with a pair of machetes. Mostly he used them as clubs, you know? The blunt edge, not the cutting edge. Caved in their skulls.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “What?”

  “I’m interested in the aftermath,” Remington said.

  “Well, we tracked him to a lakeside parking lot at the forest preserve. Standing there waiting for us. We had our emergency response, like twenty officers. Guy had at least a dozen barrels staring at him, everybody screaming ‘Hands on your head! Hands on your head!’ But he’s not moving, coming off all unconcerned like.”

  “Except he’s got two machetes, one in each hand.”

  “We yell at him long enough, then our chief details one of our marksmen, Andy Sheen, tightest spreads on the range—like, he almost went to the Olympics. Chief tells him to drop the guy. At fifty yards, that’s like telling Michael Jordan to sink a layup. So Andy pops one off. Bing! He misses. No one can believe it. We all look at him like he’s nuts. Reloads, another pass, bing, and through the field glasses I could see the little puff of fabric where the load takes him in the heart. The bad guy’s dead, right? But he doesn’t fall.”

  “A vest.”

  “Yeah, he’s wearing a vest, one of those new lightweight ones. But even then, you know, it’s like being hit by a baseball bat. Dude staggers a little but stays on his feet. Everybody’s minds are, like, blown away. Then it turned even stranger. Guy puts the blades on his shoulders, crisscross like, and he hooks the handles of the machetes together to create a kind of scissors, then uses the scissors to cut off his own head. I swear to God, the dude lops his own head off.”

  The sergeant waited for her reaction. He repeated it for emphasis. “Cuts his own head off!”

  Remington figured if she didn’t say something they’d be there forever. “Wow!”

  “And get this, he still doesn’t fall. His head’s hanging by threads, you know, veins and neck sinews and shit. He’s got a geyser shooting up, like Old Faithful. Still on his feet. Drops his blades, takes his head and kind of snaps it away from his own body, like you’re twisting an apple off a tree. Tries to throw it at us. Sort of feeble at that point, so he can’t get any heft behind it.”

  “Then he drops.”

  “We’ve got a guy on our force, E. J. O’Brien, an evangelical, he started to say the Lord’s Prayer. Oddest thing. Us all facing off in the trailhead parking lot, standing there in shock.”

  “Meanwhile, the perp’s standing there in shock, too.”

  “Right, that was how we explained it later, you know? Had to be circulatory shock. The human body in that state can do odd things. E.J.—I swear this is true—E.J. gets through the whole prayer with the guy still upright, maybe sagging a little, but, man, he was headless and still on his feet. Some of the guys are freaked out enough to be saying the words along with E.J. They all roll into ‘thine is the kingdom,’ and the killer bends at the knees. We think he’ll go down, but he holds on for the ‘for ever and ever, Amen.’ ”

  “Christ in the foothills,” Remington muttered.

  “I never heard that one, but you and me both, sister. We had three guys from the response team put in for medical.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “To tell you the truth, I thought of doing it myself.” Lowell’s voice dropped a couple of registers. “I’m going to give you something real freaky. Nothing gets out, okay, Layla? It’s Layla, right? Like the song?”

  “Right.”

  “The prelim postmortem on the John Doe. He had a case of blood poisoning that would have killed him pretty soon anyway. High levels of cocaine and PCP in his veins—I mean, of course, right? But listen to this. The medical examiner believes he had some sort of lobotomy.”

  “Really? Must’ve been hard to tell, his head in the shape it was, shot multiple times.”

  “Oh, the M.E. could tell. A blade cuts different from a bullet. Frontal lobes completely severed. Nobody knew what to make of it. We have a female pathologist on the staff. She suggested, you know, maybe the guy performed a brain operation on himself with one of his machetes. She wasn’t serious, but people are pretty upset around here. It was what my dear ninety-year-old grandma would call weirdy.”

  Another silence sprang up between them. Not prayerful, exactly, more sober and thoughtful like. Remington c
ould hear a faint crackle of static on the line.

  “I’m interested in one of the vics, too,” she finally said.

  “The Loushane girl.”

  “Yes. I don’t know how to ask this. I realize the guy really rampaged through the cabin. He pay any special attention to her?”

  —

  Remington drove down to Central Community to brace Chuck Tester about the Kappa Kappa Chi killings. If the sergeant had a duty post anywhere, it was at the low, well-muraled downtown station house of the LAPD. He wasn’t there often, but that afternoon she found him in.

  “Everyone’s going berserk about the Loushane girl’s murder around here.”

  The police station didn’t look berserk to Remington. It looked sleepy. The bull pen, where Tester kept a desk, was deserted.

  “Where are you with it?” Remington asked.

  “I don’t have anything I can share, especially not with a police-academy probationary officer who doesn’t even bother to attend her classes.”

  So Tester had heard about her week away, even though he probably didn’t know that she’d been in Tijuana. “Come on, Chuck,” she said. “I know the family, remember.”

  “You want to fly before you can crawl. Listen, Layla, you have a nice, fat berth in the LAPD waiting for you once you get brevetted. You’re golden. Just keep your head down, do your course work and go to class, you knucklehead.”

  “Okay, okay—but the Kappa killings.”

  “Do you even listen? Lake Geneva is radioactive right now. If the Middle East thing hadn’t happened, it would still be on the front page of the Times.”

  “What if I have something on it?”

  “Family gossip? You can’t possibly have anything that the department wants to hear. Don’t get ahead of yourself. Everybody wants to have climbed the mountain, but nobody wants to actually climb the mountain.”